In the Shadows
by Pam t3h Spam
Summary: In the shadows, there is no way of divining what one sees: it could be princess or vagabond, ruler or minstrel. Zelda prefers it this way, the anonymity of the dark canvas on which she can imagine—anything. OOT Zelda reflects on the man of her life.


**In the Shadows  
**** Pam t3h Spam  
Disclaimer: Zelda property of Nintendo  
**

She misses him.

She never realized how much she had come to depend on him in those seven short years—short but oh-so-very-sweet—and now he is gone. A gaping void in her reality that shadows her from bedroom to council table to stable: softly, gently persistent. It is worst in the mornings, when the sun hangs high and bright in the skies and makes his absence just that more obvious, and so the princess of purity and light comes to cherish the dark hours. It is only within the forgiving embrace of midnight, when the mirror hung on her bedroom wall charitably reflects all things in equal shades of black, that she can pretend not to see herself not seeing him.

She tried to say it once, she remembers. She tried, with the tight, choking feeling of her hourglass trickling empty behind her, to tell the full truth.

"To have been able to have this adventure with you...was indeed a pleasure," she had begun, tears brimming in her eyes like an overflow of the emotion rising up in her chest.

And Link had simply said, "I missed you."

She had wanted to explain herself, but events had intervened. Capture, rescue, battle to fight, magic to perform. And after that, there was the long process of rebuilding to do and more evil to avert and Zelda's chance to tell Link had slipped away. So the only person who might have understood—doesn't.

She wonders, in brief moments of weakness, what it would change to tell Link everything. She knows, in longer spells of lucidity, that the answer is nothing. The two of them are far too set in their ways now: Link the dashing hero, forever journeying to untamed lands and new adventures, Zelda the pristine princess, forever locked in her prison of marble and silk and gold.

Because it is still a prison for all that they call it a palace, and no amount of expensive tapestries and extravagant feasts can change that. It is at times like this in particular, when the full moon shines down from the sky with piercing luminescence, illuminating every detail of the wealth that disguises Zelda's grand cell, scattering the shadows that are her only solace, that she feels ready to burst from her skin. She draws the heavy curtains at her window; silver slivers of light peek through the edges. She paces, shoulders hunched and arms crossed and fingers tap-tapping a nervous tattoo. She sits. She lies down. She closes her eyes, opens them, jumps back up, tries in vain once more to draw the curtains fully closed. She races, defeated, to her balcony and leans against the railing, inhaling the cool night air.

She gives in. She stands there in the open and drinks in the moonlight—but it isn't the same here, shivering in her ornate dress with smooth, safe marble under her flimsy slippers. She wants to be _down there_, feet planted in the cool grass and the cold mud and the little pebbles that work their ways into shoes. She wants feel the bite of frigid wind in the hours before the sun rises, the dry heat of desert dust, the comforting _plop-plop_ of raindrops dripping from soaked hair. She wants to taste the charred, gamey flavor of just-killed meat eaten in the open air: dry, tough, burnt outside, undercooked inside, but indisputably delicious for the fact that she herself cooked and cleaned and killed it. She wants—and her fingers unconsciously pluck at her silken robes—to pick out tunes on a lyre on a night just like this one, from the center of a field as vast as an ocean, in a solitude that renders this same blinding moonlight soft and welcoming and indescribably beautiful. She wants—

—to leap off and out of this prison of hers with the nimbleness that became second nature during those seven years. But her muscles probably don't remember the movements and so she turns abruptly back to her warm room.

She stands before her mirror and scrutinizes her own reflection, helpfully lit as it is by tonight's moonlight. Her eyes move coldly over the porcelain skin, the smooth hair, the polished nails, the impeccable clothing, the expression of lovely, demure grace, and her heart sinks a little. _Fool_, she chides herself. _What else do you expect?_ She continues staring with heart growing heavier and heavier by the second until a stray cloud crosses the moon's path outside, plunging the chamber into complete darkness.

From within the mirror, an inky-black shape now stares back. In the shadows, there is no way of divining what one sees: it could be princess or vagabond, ruler or minstrel. Zelda prefers it this way, the anonymity of the dark canvas on which she can imagine red eyes and disheveled hair and golden lyre and battered blue clothing. She sees him only in the shadows, and it seems somehow...fitting.

Something comes back to her, an echo from that time when she had tried to explain everything and failed to say anything, and she can hear Link saying,

"I'm a little sad to not be able to see Sheik anymore."

Zelda stares into the shadows, at the last remaining vestige of one she holds nearest and dearest to her heart. She misses him too.

* * *

**Please review and tell me how you felt! I had LOTS of fun with this—hopefully my misdirection throughout the first half or so did its job and you were properly confused for a while :P **

**As you may have noticed, I took the liberty of stealing lines from the Akira Himekawa OOT manga (and then completely reinterpreting them for my own devices xD) because the canon game ones didn't serve my purpose quite as well.**

**Very fast write of an idea I've been tossing around for a while—wow, it took only 2 hours and no revisions to get down oo Believe me, that's SHORT for me! I really REALLY enjoyed this theme; I'm considering expounding in future fics.**

**EDIT: BWAHAHA! Right after uploading this, I've discovered...SHEIK IS COMING BACK FOR SSBB! heeeeeeeellyeah!! **


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